The scrap bucket knows how often a promising beginning becomes new material.

Finished work never shows the ratio behind it. For everything on the shelf there are starts that went wrong early and got folded back into the raw stock, and the bucket is the only honest record. That is not waste in the way it looks. It is the ordinary cost of finding out what a material will do.

If you judge your own attempts by what other people display, adjust for what you cannot see. Keep something like a scrap bucket, a place where abandoned starts go without being counted as failures. Then begin the next one knowing it may end up there too.